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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK, iTunes movie rentals are still not available outside USA and UK. This could be the launch of global movie rentals.

That would explain the Euro-friendly timing of the announcement (7 am California, 4 pm Paris).

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It's even friendlier for NY.

And it's not an 'event'. I bet it's about streaming, and the PR effort will be based in New York (convenient for the big labels?), rather than in California.

North Carolina, where the new data center is, is EST just like NY.

But there's no reason to time an announcement because of North Carolina.

NYC has big media companies and their CEOs, news media and their taping studios, and Wall Street.

North Carolina has a big building full of Apple's servers. (If it's even up and running yet.) You don't set the time for a press campaign based on a big building full of hardware.

Unless Jobs is going to be on streaming video giving a tour of the facility, say, like he did when they opened the first retail store - though that was a pre-recorded video, not live. So I wouldn't bet on this, but it seems like a possibility.

A store is someplace Apple needs people to visit, so it would make sense for Jobs to do something like that, to generate interest.

From the point of view of an iTunes user, the NC data center is irrelevant. It's a hidden implementation detail. The iTunes store could be running on a G4 Mac Cube under Steve Jobs' desk, for all it matters.

You can rent movies in the French store; I've done it.

Thanks -- scratch that theory then.

Same in Canada... you can even rent "some" french movies from the canadian store, from a insultingly small selection tough.

Movies, including rentals, and TV shows are already available in the USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, France and Germany.

and Switzerland apparently. Since last week.. No TV shows though.

Each country gets access to much much smaller down list of steams, movies, books, tunes and even apps versus the USA store. As a result many of us have to use a USA iTunes ID as well, which is painful as it means access to a US credit card with a US address, which is painful after 911 rules etc. My hope would be a genuine merging of all of the country-nased iTunes store to create one world store. That may not be a big deal for US based customers, but an enormous deal for the rest of the world.

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